San Francisco-startup and bane of taxi drivers Uber is in talks for funding that would value the startup at an astronomical $10bn.

Despite its increasing trouble with regulators and cabbies, the upstart must still look like a pretty good bet to investors, since it’s hoping to raise a little less than $1bn from private equity firms, a familiar person whispered to Bloomberg.

If the funding goes through, Uber, which touts an app that matches passengers to empty seats in cars-for-hire and rideshares, will have nearly tripled its value from an already sizeable $3.5bn price-tag gained from raising $258m in funding last year. Uber is upsetting taxi drivers around the world, who accuse the biz of running roughshod over transport regulations.

An eleven-figure valuation for such a young company might seem like madness, but it's par for the course in today's startup climate. Airbnb, a room-sharing site that has a similar business model and similar problems to Uber, and online storage firm Dropbox, were both valued around the $10bn mark in recent fundraising.

These are sums that make the $5bn valuation won by Pinterest look like chump change. The kittens’n’cupcakes site said today that it had raised a new round of funding worth $200m, pushing its value from $3.8bn in October last year to $5bn in less than a year. The firm said it raised the cash from existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Valiant Capital Partners and SV Angel. ®